Peter Panyonczki: Surface and Beneath

Peter Panyonczki, Becoming, Mixed media on signbord

Within our DNA we carry the journeys of our ancestors. We are each the sum of their triumphs and of their traumas, and are the repositories of all they have endured and overcome. Artists are notoriously restless, absorbing stimuli from the environment that gives them sustenance as acute observers of their place and human nature. These observations they transmit to their chosen media.

Peter’s paintings and sculptures are a record of his intellectual and physical wanderings around our planet, connecting his native Europe to our island home in the South Pacific. He is both exile and supreme connector, an innovator, yet also the inheritor of memories. His Magyar ancestors journeyed from Siberia to present dat Hungary, carrying with them a distinctive language and culture. Their migrations inspired awe and fear in the Western European mind in the guise of Atilla the Hunn. The name ‘Panyoczki’ reflects migrations of Slavs to the heart of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. Peter, however, also carries the trauma of his own exile with his parents from his native Hungary to the sanctuary of Switzerland, when in 1956 Russian tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Uprising.